Editorial: A murder mystery that never recedes

By The Denver Post, Digital First Media

Monday, October 28, 2013

For 17 years, the death of JonBenét Ramsey has provoked passionate debate between those eager to accuse her parents of the crime and those equally confident John and Patsy Ramsey had no role at all and the culprit was an outside intruder.

As it happens, Friday’s release of a Boulder, Colo., grand jury indictment in 1999 accusing the Ramseys of two counts each of child abuse resulting in death does nothing to settle that debate.

We may never know why former Boulder District Attorney Alex Hunter refused to prosecute the Ramseys after the grand jury’s indictment. For the moment, at least, he’s not talking. It’s reasonable to assume, however, that he didn’t think he could get a conviction, and in that belief he may have been correct.

As defense attorney Dan Recht told The Denver Post, the indictment itself suggests a “classic compromise grand jury decision,” with the jurors failing to agree on a murder charge and so settling on lesser charges.

Or the grand jury believed that these were the most serious charges that could be successfully prosecuted.

One of those charges is that the Ramseys provided “assistance to a person … knowing the person being assisted has committed and was suspected of the crime of murder in the first degree and child abuse resulting in death.” What the grand jury had in mind with this is difficult to say. And since grand jury testimony remains shielded, the reference may remain mysterious.

To be sure, Hunter’s successor as Boulder district attorney, Mary Lacy, later exonerated and apologized to the Ramseys based on DNA evidence not available to the grand jury. The DNA was from an unknown male and was found “on two separate items of clothing” worn by the girl at the time she was killed.

Lacy was of course right to consider the DNA “very significant and powerful evidence.” But she was in no position actually to exonerate a couple who were in the house at the time of the murder so long as the crime remained unsolved. And Lacy said as much herself in 2006 after an embarrassing fiasco in which John Mark Karr was briefly considered a suspect and even brought back from Thailand on that basis.

The facts of the JonBenét case are simply too strange for anyone to issue confident proclamations regarding guilt or innocence.

Nevertheless, Charlie Brennan of the Daily Camera and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press deserve a lot of credit for pressing the lawsuit that resulted in the indictment’s release. As Brennan explained, the actions of the grand jury had been misreported, whereas now that record “stands corrected and completed.”

Nothing about the JonBenét Ramsey case has ever been straightforward, which is one of the reasons for the public fascination with it for so many years. And a grand jury’s indictment that the district attorney refused to act upon only reinforces the remarkable pattern.